Reclaim your personal agency in a crisis
Recorded at Climate Con 2021 on November 9, 2021
Reclaim your personal agency in a crisis
Navigating the climate crisis is mentally exhausting, and can be emotionally draining to the point of paralysis. But there’s a better way. Let’s discuss how to navigate the very real challenges of this crisis, and regain personal agency through things like processing emotions, reconnecting with nature, joining a movement, having fun, and taking a nap. Not included: doom-scrolling.
A conversation with:
Caroline Hickman (University of Bath, Climate Psychology)
Heather McTeer Toney (Environmental Defense Fund)
Elin Kelsey, PHD (Leader on evidence-based hope)
Dr. Eliza Nemser (Climate Changemakers)
Full transcript.
Kristen: We know a lot of kids are struggling with climate anxiety and parents are often at a loss when it comes to knowing how to support them. Honestly, a lot of us adults are too struggling with climate anxiety. The size and scope of the challenge that persistent doom and gloom in the news, no one really telling you what you're supposed to do about any of it. It all really adds up and becomes paralyzing. But remembering that you alone can control your response and that you do have agency is one of the first steps for each of us who wants to be doing something in this space.
So this next panel I'm really excited to introduce, brings together a few folks who can help us understand the complicated emotions of the climate crisis, how to acknowledge and work through them. And also why staying hopeful isn't just wishful thinking, but it's also backed by evidence.
Eliza Nemser: Thanks so much, Kristin. And thanks to all of the organizers of Climate Con this is phenomenal effort to pull together in a couple of weeks. I'm really pleased to be here. My name is Eliza Nemser, I'm thrilled to be moderating this panel on reclaiming your personal agency in a crisis, because we're in one and navigating it is mentally exhausting and can be emotionally draining.
And yet by processing the reality and the news coming at us and our own emotional and cognitive responses, and then setting the intention to be hopeful and to make change. And then of course, by taking action, we can navigate this challenge and claim our personal agency. A word about myself, I come to this work of engagement on climate and climate action as a geoscientist as a mom and I am navigating my own pursuit of agency and outsized impact. Honestly as a real introvert who's outside of I'm outside of my comfort zone constantly in this work. And yet, I'm this huge cheerleader for personal agency and engagement and pulling folks off the sidelines and helping them plug into productive work and channel their concern. So I personally am filled with gratitude for leaders like our panelists who are guiding us all in this process. And so I'm thrilled to introduce them. I'll start by introducing Caroline Hickman, a climate psychologist who teaches at the University of Bath and is a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance. Thank goodness, such a group exists. And this group is contributing specialist psychological knowledge to bear on the climate and ecological crisis.
Our second panelist, Heather McTeer Toney is currently serving as an environmental justice liaison for the Environmental Defense Fund. Heather speaks pragmatically about the need to account for the past and how instilling perseverance and perspective is critical to adaptation.
And we're also joined by Elin Kelsey. Elin is a leading spokesperson and scholar and educator in the area of evidence based hope, which is my favorite phrase ever that there's evidence-based hope. And Elin makes the case for hope punk when talking about climate change and maintains that to be hopeless is to be uninformed.
So for this panel, we're going to talk about climate anxiety. We're going to go there and we're going to talk about the real ways to grapple with tough emotions and to move towards action. We'll touch on three key things: processing. So processing the news and the thoughts and the feelings that it evokes, airing climate anxiety and working through it. So after processing, setting the intention to have hope and to make change and bringing attention to the fact that we have so much to fight for, and then finally accessing the tools to move from anxiety to agency. So with that, I am just thrilled to move to you all. And Caroline, because we're going to start with this idea of processing I would love to start with you. Can you please share your story of how you got into climate and your role as someone who supports adults, but also youth in the face of the crisis.
Caroline Hickman: Thank you and thank you for asking me to join this wonderful panel. 25 years ago, I was an environmental activist in one part of my life and I was a psychotherapist in the other parts of my life and the two didn't particularly join up. And then I had a fabulous midlife crisis and ran away to Egypt to be a diving instructor for a couple of years.
I just needed to immerse myself in another world really and hang out with the fish and the sharks and really just take time to reflect on what I've been doing. And what I found was that the grief that I felt as I saw the destruction of the coral reef suddenly brought everything home to me by being immersed in it, by seeing this by no longer living in a city, I could feel it on a different level. And I thought: "Ah! Okay, I understand this as a different level now." And then I started dreaming every night about psychotherapy and I thought: "Oh! It's time to go back to dry land and to Ingland and to find ways to join these parts of my life together." So that's what I did. So then I found the Climate Psychology Alliance and started researching globally how children and young people feel using quite research, psycho-social creative methodologists talking to children as young as five and six, about how they feel about climate change. Which I guess I'll be talking about more as we go. I hope that's enough of an intro for now.
Eliza Nemser: That's a great intro. We will talk more, but I want to hear a little bit more about your work with children and how big of a part of your day to day and your being understanding of the work you're doing right now is.
Caroline Hickman: Yeah. Officially, it's supposed to be a part of my wag and officially it's taking over my work. And so it should, because quite honestly, what else should we be doing right now? As far as I'm concerned. Barack Obama, I think in 2015 or something said, our children in the future are gonna look back at us and say, did we do all that we could have done to deal with this? And so I think actually the job of all of us is to do all that we can possibly do right now. That's what's most important.
So I'm a lecturer at the University of Bath, but my research there is definitely entirely focused around children and young people. It's been primarily for the last 10 years, qualitative research. But in the last year, we've done a big quantitative research project with 10,000 children globally asking them not just how they feel, but how they think about climate change. And also what happens when they try to talk to people about this. And I'm not going to bore you with too many figures, but I am going to say one of the things that I think is most worrying about that research is that 48% of this 10,000 children and young people told us that they felt ignored or dismissed when they tried to talk about climate change. We may struggle to go to zero carbon emissions tomorrow, but we could actually change the 48% of children and young people globally, not feeling listened to tomorrow by changing that relationship with how we listened to them and how we tolerate, how they feel about this cause often for children and young people, those feelings, and those thoughts are really hard for adults to understand.
I'll tell you what a 10 year old said to me three years ago, he said, Caroline, he said, you don't get it. He said, because you grew up thinking polar bears would be there forever. He said, I've grown up thinking, they'll go extinct knowing they'll go extinct. So there's really something really important to me. I'm hugely passionate about seeing this through children's eyes. Allowing ourselves to tolerate how it feels to see it the way they see it, and not collapse into that. As adults. I've done a lot of work with parent groups and adults around this as well, not to feel overwhelmed by the guilt and the shame and the grief and the feeling that we're helpless and that we can't do something about this, but to step towards those difficult conversations with children and young people, because that makes an enormous difference for them is that sense of intergenerational understanding and that we can do something about immediately. So I tend to give a long answer so I'm waiting for you to stop me. Keep talking.
Thanks for kicking us off. I appreciate it. And we're going to circle back to your work in a moment. I appreciate it. Heather, I love to hear from you. I know you used to run the Mom's Clean Air Force and you come to this work also through the lens of our responsibility as adults and parents and dealing with kids and how they're grappling and I would love to hear your story of how you shifted so effectively to a place of taking action.
Heather McTeer Toney: So I will be very candid and transparent because I came to this from a place of being also a woman of color, a black woman living in the south surrounded by environmental issues, but never being able to connect the dots.
And it was actually from coming from a place from somebody telling me that I was doing environmental justice work and not realizing that's what I was actively doing as I was working in serving as actually a mayor of my community, that I began to just get upset at the fact that as a black woman, no one told me that the work that I was doing, touching the land, the soil, I'm from the Mississippi Delta all of the touches that I had to agriculture resources, were couched in an environmental way, but also the environmental injustices that I took for granted every single day that I saw around me.
And so it was, this space of realizing that I too am an environmentalist, but how I look at it is so important. So indicative to what the solutions are. And from a very candid space of being in politics of going in the rustle and bustle of doing stuff every single day, and at the same time realizing, you know what, I'm a mom, I have a five-year-old at home. I have a almost 16 year old at home. And how they think about climate action is totally driven by what they see me do. So I come from the faith community. I come from a space where I'm surrounded by African-American culture and all of the things that come along with being a part of a social justice movement.
My children are experiencing the same thing. So they're going to react to what they see me react to. My 15 year old right now, though she seen me work in climate justice and climate action, the most important thing to her is social justice and criminal behavior. What she sees her friends experiencing every single day. So my responsibility is to alleviate that anxiety for her, but also helping her to see that through a lens of climate action. So now she looks as extreme weather and extreme heat as one of the indicators and behaviors to how people will react with respect to violence. And that's how she can address the issue.
So connecting these dots, I think within communities of color, the way that we experienced them is so important. My dad, he's retired, he's a retired civil rights attorney. So it's been really interesting though, to just over the years of talking to him, he's trying to figure out how in the world did you get to climate action and climate justice when you grew up in voters rights? Like, where did that leap come from? And even today, we are talking about the hope, about the opportunities, about the space, about the faith. And quite frankly I think I had to come to a place of understanding that I don't have the privilege not to do that. And let me explain, when I think about African-American people where we are in black America today, the fact that we are the product of the people who came from one ecosystem, on one planet, I'm sorry, one continent and through a very traumatic way were removed from their ecosystem, plants, derms, animal, people, transferred across the Atlantic Ocean into an entirely different ecosystem. Having to come to grips with different environments. And then still through an even more traumatic way being subjected to the trauma of being enslaved and dealing with people from an entirely different ecosystem and we survived. No, I do not have the privilege of denying the blood that runs through me that literally is resiliency in itself. That helps to create and push past the anxiety of, yes, we've got stuff to do every single day. I have a five-year-old that totally flipped out when getting his COVID vaccine and that seemed like a crisis. But at the same time, I come from people who survived crisis. They came and figured out a way of pushed through and they did not have the privileges that I have today. To tell my children that you're not going to make it. It is my responsibility to keep continuing and pushing in that hope, because that's what I have been born, bred, trained to do anything else and to do anything less, it's disrespect to the people that I come from.
I know, it might be a really rough time for us in terms of trying to figure this climate stuff out, but we will figure it out. We will figure it out because we will figure out how we will continue to survive and thrive on this planet collaboratively and learning from the lessons from those who have come before us. So I'm excited to talk about that. Also talking about how you need to take a moment in risk, but how we keep together that energy. I think of ourselves and doing this work.
Eliza Nemser: Thank you so much. Yeah, that was really beautifully put. We have no choice is what I'm hearing. And there may or may not have been some ear piercing screams in a Walgreens yesterday with my seven year old. And yet here we are every day because we have no choice and I'm seeing in the chat someone's here because of the air quality issues in the Bay area. It's a lot of why I come to this as a mom of asthmatic kids and who are now checking air quality all the time every time they step outside practically.
And as a parent, I feel we have absolutely no choice, but to deal with this head on. So I love that and thank you so much for your words about what you bring to this work, Heather. Elin I would love to come to you and hear about your journey to this point. What led you to the evidence-based study and practice of hope and in this particular context.
Elin Kelsey: Yeah. I'm really struck by how both, what Caroline is speaking about and what Heather is speaking about ties to all of this, because I think, first of all, recognizing how emotionally laid in all of this is just crucial. And I would say there's been a lot of work done in the last decade or a little bit longer to recognize the complexity of feelings that we have around climate crisis, social justice issues. It's so important to see these as emotion laid in fields. And I think for a long time, we talked about climate change as if it was just about information rather than our emotional responses to it.
So one of the things in the last year I've done is co-created a Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators, which is a network of people from around the world who work in this area and that toolkit is really our combination of resources that people can look at when they're interested in creating safe spaces to talk about this complexity of feelings.
So that work is there. And then I suppose my own driver has been, when we talk about the climate crisis, we so often are in a doom and gloom narrative, and it leads to, Caroline mentioned the young person who said, polar bears will go extinct, this sort of fatalistic beliefs that it becomes so pervasive that they become really disempowering.
And my own work sits around this question of how does that narrative become so ingrained that we hear it regardless of where we are all around the world. It crosses socioeconomic levels, it crosses geography. This gloom and doom narrative is causing what Anthony Leiserowitz at Yale University causes hope gap.
So we're now at a point where climate change is widely recognized thanks to lots of good work as being a crucial issue in many countries across many people. So that's not where we were not long ago, but it is where we are now. And a big issue now is that we believe we can't do anything about it.
So Caroline's work is so informative to that. Elen Fieldat at Ted University just did a cross-country study of kids in Canada, between grade 7 and grade 12 and found, almost 50% of them absolutely believe there's nothing that can be done about the climate crisis. So that is not where we wish to be. And so where my work has taken me as into, what's the construction of that doom and gloom. Yes. We have urgent, vital issues that we are all very aware of and are, and need our attention. There's no question of that. And yet we know that the number one way we learn about the environment is through the media and almost all the media that we hear about climate is in a problem orientation.
So we don't hear in a current timestamp way, those things that are in fact having a positive impact for air pollution, for underserved communities. And because we don't hear about them, we feel like we're at the starting line where all the hard work lies ahead, and it also prevents us from hearing what does work so that we can amplify that and use that in our political, to our political end. And so my work has really taken me into this advocacy for evidence-based solutions. And there's been this real emergence of a field called solutions journalism, which is now a network of media people from all over the world who say, we need to look just as rigorously at the solutions. Where's the evidence for them? Where does it work? How does it need to be tailored? As we do the problems. And that's what I mean by evidence-based hope is that hope that is informed by things that actually are moving in the directions that we need more of a need to hold people accountable to, but nonetheless are changing.
And I like to draw on, the Youth Climate Movement in 2019, largest movement on earth, by 2020 1 in 10 people on earth live in a place that has declared a climate emergency. That is a tremendous outcome of a massive movement. And yet, because we've been in this media clips of COVID, many people believe that climate change fell down in terms of people's concern, but the research shows us that's not the case that climate change concern really is high. And our big issue now is of course the sense of disempowerment.
Eliza Nemser: Yes, thank you so much. And this sense of it's really a crisis of agency in a sense. And so that's what we're here to talk about, how you move through this overwhelm to the agency piece. And we can get up on top of that.
Thank you so much for that and for your important work, this toolkit that you described this essential toolkit. I haven't been monitoring the chat, but, Did that end up in there? We have a way to access that?
Elin Kelsey: I's such a long title: 'Existential toolkit for climate justice educators.'
Eliza Nemser: Seems like a handy link.
Okay. Super. Thank you. Let's loop back to the processing piece Caroline, I keep thinking and with this idea of needle fear really brings us to a head like this acute fear with all the, in this blessing of kids being able to get shots now I keep thinking about, we're all processing a lot of really big and scary information. Young people are. And there's different age groups here. I think it's probably important to distinguish between 5 year olds, 10 year olds and 15 year olds. But the question that it brings to my mind, again, with this idea of this big, scary needle bringing such, an amazing inoculation, what does it mean to feel safe?
What does it mean to feel safe? In the context of the climate emergency and how do we grapple with that as parents and as adults and how do we help our kids feel safe as we understand what's going on around us, that the polar bears are on the outs here.
Caroline Hickman: Okay. You giving me the small questions. Thank you. I hope you've got three hours for me to talk now. That's what it's going to take, okay? But I also want to thank my co-panelists for such lovely words as well. I'm going to attempt to answer this succinctly. I think safety has to be understood in terms of navigating uncertainty and vulnerability now.
And anything else I think would be delusional and giving people false hope and a fantasy, a fairy tale. We can't live in the fairy story. And we've been hearing this from my colleagues here. That, so this is how I would frame it and I want you to bear with me and listen to the end.
So it's already too late, it's already too late for the Maldives. It's already too late for Bangladesh. It's already too late for the young people in Nigeria, this I worked with in India. It's too late for very many of these communities around the world. We've done the damage. And even if we went to zero carbon emissions tomorrow, which we're not going to manage, it's still, too late.
So we need to face that reality. But we need to ground ourselves in that reality and reframe that reality. So I want to talk about radical hope and talk about how we navigate in this vulnerability and uncertainty down the center of this. Because I spend a lot of time talking with the children in the Maldives who recognize that it's probably too late for their country. So we have to find a way to be able to tolerate that and not collapse into apocalyptic doom and gloomism. And we also have to be equally careful of the opposite end, which is naive hope and optimism. The fairy story of, we can fix this. It's too late.
In the middle of those two things is the vulnerability in the uncertainty and the radical hope that says and this is, you have to tolerate this, in psychotherapy terms we talk about rupture and repair. We have to recognize what we've got wrong in order to fix it. And Jacinda Ardern recently did an amazing ritual of seeking reparation from the indigenous population, for the harm that had been committed by white colonialists, who had destroyed their families and stolen their children.
And in that reparation, she was able to repair something utterly crucial. So this might sound, but I'm not, it might sound as though I'm saying it's awful. I am not. What I'm saying is we're feeling anxiety, we're feeling vulnerability, we're feeling insecure because we should. That is the reality of what we should be feeling. And we need to be able to tolerate that disruption and unsettled feeling because we care. We only feel this because we care. And I don’t want to take away our care. We have a culture of un-care globally otherwise we wouldn't be in this mess. We have to accept that we feel disrupted, we feel upset, we feel anxious because we care. Who we should feel proud of caring.
So I want to talk about how to navigate eco anxiety and transform it into eco empathy, eco connection, eco community, eco justice, because that's how we transform it, but we transform it not by making it nice, but by facing the awful grounded reality of what we've done, say, sorry and fix it. I can't meet with groups of young people at the moment without saying, sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry about what my generation has done. And similarly, we should be saying, sorry for the injury and the injustice of, colonial power around the world that has also brought us into this mess. We need to keep saying sorry. If we accept what we've done, then we have the opportunity to fix it.
And that comes from self esteem and responsibility. So how do we stay safe? I think we stay safe by recognizing that insecurity makes perfect sense actually. And to be okay with not being okay. And to not judge that, and to not be afraid of these feelings, actually. I think we need true resilience, emotional resilience, which means actually I can feel anxious. I can feel depressed and I'm glad that I do because it connects me with other people imperfectly and I'm okay with not feeling okay, but I don't collapse. I use that to build my resilience and build my empathy and build this radical hope.
Heather McTeer Toney: Yeah, Caroline, I think absolutely. If we stopped all of the emitting right now today, it's like water in a pipe. When you turn off the faucet, there's still water inside the water hose, there's still water inside the pipe. And so that water can't go back up into the faucet. It's got to come out the pipe.
And so we have to recognize that right now today, if we were to turn off the pipe, the water is going to the mountains, the water is coming out and it's going to these vulnerable populations and indigenous communities that will be impacted. And we cannot shift that, it is grounding in reality that is step one.
But it is also a recognition that we can ensure that at some point we're slowing that faucet, we're turning it off, we're turning it down as well as making preparations for now. How do we adapt adaptation and resiliency? Because that's what we have to move to. We can't sit and dwell in this "woe is me" place because the longer we sit and dwell in the "woe is me" place, the longer the faucet stays on.
So examples from home, that's where I am all the time. My teenager will go outside and she will turn on that water faucet and be in Lala land on her phone or something else. And the next thing I know I've got a flooded backyard or my five year old is running around, not paying attention because they're doing something else. We have to pay attention and we cannot afford to sit. That does not mean we don't feel, it doesn't. It just means we have to understand and respect how other people feel. I get excited and hopeful because I think about the fact I did not have to teach my five-year-old how to recycle. I never taught that child where things go.
He learned it from his sister. It’s never been a topic for him, it is never been a question as to why, it's never been a part of his, not a part of his life. If you hand my son a plastic bottle, he's going to go and look for the place that he's supposed to put it because in his mind, nothing else has existed.
I never had to talk that. Teach. That made me hopeful because it means that these lessons they're teaching each other, they're talking to each other, they're picking it up from different spaces. So they're adapting. They're getting it. I can go sit down and take a nap for a minute because they got that part. If he walks into somebody else's house and they don't have it, he is looking at them like, what is wrong with you? Plastic does not go into the trash bin. Are you all from earth? Like really? That's not what we do. Mommy, they don't have it. That's his tone and his conversation. So it's not one of doom and gloom. It is, this is how the world works.
I'm hopeful because that gives me a better sense of, we're going to adapt. We as adults, I think need to begin to look at how that adaptation overlaps into other spaces, because we're going to have to talk about climate immigration. We're going to talk about policies that are inclusive for that water again, that is already in the pipe that we have to make adjustments for and adaptation for and collaborate for. And we can't do that if we are, in the doom and gloom space. I totally, Caroline, I just amen what you said, because I think it is again, grounding us in this space of "It is what it is." It doesn't do us any, not adding any hair to my head, if I'm worrying about. It is what it is. So now let's figure out how we're going to adapt and move forward and stopping.
Eliza Nemser: I am too. I'm so moved by, all of these words too and just the living with the complexity and what that means. And Heather, the faucet or hose, is it a faucet or a hose? It's a pipe. That analogy
Heather McTeer Toney: It can be a waterhole it can be a pipe. We all get it, once you turn it on and there is some type of connective tissue it's on, it's not going back up and guess what, here's the other thing about it, at your house you've already paid for it. Once you turn that faucet on you have paid for it, the water company is not going to give you a credit back on your bill because you have that water in the pipe that you say you didn't use. We pay for it. Our children have paid the price for it. It is what it is.
Eliza Nemser: It's, sorry. No, it's so illustrative and so helpful, and this is the agency piece, and this is the agency gap that we bridge when we actually claim our agency. It's the turning it down, what's in there is in there and we have this option now to turn it down. And before we move to some of these questions from the chat, Elin, I just would love to ask you in order to reach for it and turn it down, and live with all of this complexity in our hearts and in our minds, you need to have hope. And so, how do you get to a place of hope? How do you get there again? Is this something you can trick yourself into? How do you cultivate it on an ongoing basis? Talk about the benefits of hope and how you hold onto it in order to keep your hand on that faucet and keep turning it down and ask your friends to start turning it down too.
Elin Kelsey: It's such a good question and I think I've answered in a few ways. One, is I think it's really important to look at where we are just as we've been saying that, and I hold a different view about being fatalistic about what will be. I think we have to be really careful not to place a future vision as if it's a truth in a foregone conclusion.
I think we have to really stay in the, what is and look at that in its most effective evidence-based way. And then I think secondly is recognizing. We have to reconfigure it. Emotions are contagious, both face-to-face and online. And we live in a world where in 2020 doom scrolling was a word of the year because we scroll from one bad story to the next.
And if we know that we're almost hearing nothing about actual solutions that are happening, one of the really critical ways of staying hopeful is staying up to date. So instead of assuming that everything was good and has become terrible. I think we have to say, Hey, what do I know about polar bears today?
What is happening with polar bears today? What's happening with other things today, rather than assuming whatever thing I'm most worried about is still stuck where it was. And when we get in the practice of looking at timely timestamped content, we see really important changes. Like right now there's a discussion at the COP around conserving 30% of land by 2030.
That's a big change from, I've worked in Marine protected areas and back when president Bush was leaving office, we were trying to convince him to establish the world's largest Marine protected area, which we successfully did. But at that time we were talking about a couple of percentage points. Now, 10 years later, it's 30% we're arguing for.
And we have to push for that, there's a lot of things around that, but because that's been in place, we do see recoveries that we didn't anticipate. And I think, looking at the fact that we are one of 8.7 million other species on earth and that those species have agency is a really big part. So right now the World Economic Forum, for example, puts a price tag of over a million dollars on each whale, that's recovering, because they're so good at capturing carbon. They move phytoplankton up to the surface. Those humpback whales, for example every population, but two that I know of is in a really rapid recovery. Those sorts of things are unexpected. We did not expect the ending of commercial whaling, of humpback whales, that suddenly now we have these climate engineers in the ocean and think of them in those ways. So it's the complexity of our interconnections to the rest of the world and staying up to date with changes as they happen, which enables us to hold on to changes that are happening, that inspire our hope.
And I think that is a really crucial part. You'll notice that I'm sitting outside just in terms of self care and allyship and those sorts of things. The more time we spend outside, we know there's a lot of research that shows how good that is for us and we could do our zooms outside if we're lucky, and just thinking about what meetings we can do outside, just those kinds of interconnections also really matter on a personal basis.
But I can't emphasize enough the recognizing agency in other species as well as each other and being up to date. We know that 100 countries signed on at the COP to a deforestation agreement. We know we have to hold that accountable. We know it's fraught with problems, but that is a much different place than we were at, not that long ago.
And so recognizing those trends allows us to push for more and better. I caught the tail end of your previous panel and they were saying, expecting more and asking for more comes a lot easier when you've got the evidence behind you to say, Hey, this is happening here and I expect it to happen here.
That information is a powerful way to stay hopeful. And I would say that the real feelings we have of despair and anger and grief need to be honored and express. And we need to be up to date on whether the things that are fueling them are actually still where they were when we first felt them, and in what ways are those things shifting?
Heather McTeer Toney: Can I piggyback on that just a little bit? Because there's so many, this is so rich. There's so many things that were just said, but going together where we are with our kids. How do we just maintain our agency? Have fun. Some of this are things we have imagined whether we know it or not. Stay with me for a second, because I am a huge science fiction fan. My kids love comic books. It is something that is just like, it's what we do. And my daughter has been watching whatever the latest Marvel movie is that came out, where she totally felt like she saw herself and saw climate action.
I have been tying together this strong connection between, Black Pander and, Black Panther and the citizens of Wakanda and Dune because I'm a huge Dune fan, like back the 1984. So this is my inner geek 80 coming, 80's coming out. I realized that in all of these spaces, we've seen this before. There's no way in the world that the creator of a 1964 comic book and science fiction movie can talk about ecology, white men, mind you can write about ecology and about saving the planet and how we look at it from an ecological perspective from also the perspective of biopic people, quite frankly. And now we have re-imagined it into realizing like what you just said. It's really what we're doing. You mentioned humpback whales and I was tickling myself because like, my child was thinking about the worms in Dune, and how they're removing some of the processes and the spice and they're regenerating and how the people are protecting it and how there's really this really big green forest there and, they don't realize that the indigenous people have been worriors and that's what we're supposed to do. That's almost like science fiction revealing to us what we have known for years and years. And as children, our children are looking at it but they're having fun. And we need to find spaces where we can get outside the box of what we think climate action should be and get into exploring their own creativity through movies, through music, through the stuff they do every single day, normalizing the adaptation and normalizing the science.
Even if it's science fiction. Now that might be a reach for some people, but again, that's, what's fun in our house and that's what we do. We should find those spaces that are spaces of joy that help to relieve that anxiety and make you think that living life every day, the importance of just connecting to outside and those spaces, the science of what we know, incorporating that into what we do every day into those different fun spaces, helps us to just take a deep breath and realize that we can do this work together. So that's. That's my like Comic Con, climate- con connection. I hope you all got that.
Eliza Nemser: Yeah,
I love it. And we curate Star Wars, so I had heavy duty. Caroline you. And so I'm just trying to process all these great questions coming through in the chat. And before we move to our kind of final remarks here, I see one question I would love to lift up because Caroline, I think you mentioned the word community.
And the question was, what are some of the ways that you channel, It's from Kati Franson, what are some of the ways you can channel eco anxiety into eco community / empathy / justice? That's the way that the question was framed and I want to tease out that community element and Heather just mentioned it as well and to me, that's a huge part of the antidote. But Caroline, I'd love to hear your response to Katie's question.
Caroline Hickman: Yeah, I will. Thank you. And thank you for trying it my way. We've got to remember that no one individual has individual personal responsibility for the climate crisis. It's not caused by individuals. It's caused by systemic problems that have been created over decades. It will not be resolved by individuals.
And of course there are key players and of course individual action is important and is an important part of that agency and sense of belonging and that you're doing your bits. But it's quite dangerous to think that you have too much personal responsibility here because it's a collective responsibility and collective responsibility is something, and that sense of belonging, is something that has, I'm generalizing horribly so I do apologize, but it has got lost. From that sense of belonging and being, having a shared responsibility. And that has got lost from modern contemporary society in lots of ways, particularly in industrialized societies. Even if we can keep pockets of it alive, we have generally lost it.
And I think what I'm sensing, in the way we're trying to tackle the climate unfairness, climate injustice, climate crisis is that we're forming new communities. We're forming global communities. Just look at what we're trying to do this evening, including by the way, Elin, your geese who keep running backwards and forwards.
I don't know if they geese or ducks, but everyone's totally loving them. So I've just got this, so sitting here tonight for me tonight, I've got the sense of belonging. With this lovely, amazing group of women and all the comments coming in the chat. And so that's a connection that we would not have gotten otherwise.
So out of this adversity and out of this grief and out of this sadness comes this sense of belonging because we need to belong to each other. We need to find collective global solutions. We cannot retreat behind these walls and go, oh we'll be okay here or we'll be okay there. Because the climate crisis is like nothing else that humanity has ever faced.
There is no part of the world that, won't be touched that won't be impacted on. So we're only going to find solution if we do it through community. We have no choice and, oh my gosh, if there's anything that makes me feel better too, it's actually essential and that community is not just community between different peoples, but community. Elin's been speaking to this very strongly. Community with the environment and with animals, with other species, with the other. We can't separate ourselves off and hope to save ourselves. If we don't save the koala bears and the polar bears, we might not save ourselves
Heather McTeer Toney: (...) Good resource. Just cause I know we're gonna run short on time, but rest. There is, it's okay to stop and let somebody else do it for a little. One of my favorite resources is called the Nap Ministry, N-A-P Ministry. It is an organization and group that was started by black American women to encourage people to rest, particularly women. Sit down, take a nap, go to sleep, leave the laundry, let somebody else worry with the children.
Let somebody else cook. Order a pizza, just sit down and close your eyes. I don't care if it is in the bathroom, in the bathtub, in the dark, because you cannot heal others if you yourself are sick. And it may sound simple, but it is so profound. And so under utilized just the ability to rest. We, as active as I think, especially in the climate space, we feel that urgency to move so much so that we run ourselves ragged, trying to do everything as opposed to sharing the load and taking a break.
Every major movement has had people working in different phases, but you also got to take a break and rest. So that is my call. That's my action, my call to action for folks in terms of reclaiming your agency, go take a nap for 15 minutes, go sit down.
Just get some Epsom salt from Walmart, Walgreens, wherever you are, go out in your yard, just do what you need to do. And just rest.
Eliza Nemser: I love that. Thank you. You're like the world's best panelists. Cause you, you knew what I was going to ask and you took us to the place, which was the key takeaway we are out of time, but I would like to say Heather's instruction to rest, Elin's instruction to get out side, connect with nature. I plan to take a call that I wouldn't have otherwise outside today. And Caroline's advice to find community and look around you to figure out where your community is as you spoke. I realized we are a community here that we're building, like by the minute, and I don't want it to end, but it is going to end.
I want to thank you all for your kind words and remind everyone that by resting and by being in nature and by building community, that's how we get our hand on the faucet and we turn it down. And that's the agency piece. So thanks all of you for participating. Thank you, Kristin, and all of these amazing coordinators of, and the regenerates for Climate Con and for allowing us to have this really important and moving conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thanks so much.
Heather McTeer Toney: Thank you.
Eliza Nemser: Thanks everyone., really appreciate it.
